One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 19

BY THE TIME that Leilani rose from the kitchen table to leave Geneva's trailer, she was ashamed of herself, and honest enough to admit to the shame, though dishonest enough to try to avoid facing up to the true cause of it.

She had talked with her mouth full of pie. She had hogged down a second piece. All right, okay, bad table manners and a little gluttony were cause for embarrassment, but neither was sufficient reason for shame, unless you were a hopeless self-dramatizer who believed every head cold was the bubonic plague and who wrote lousy weepy epic poems about hangnails and bad-hair days.

Leilani herself had written lousy weepy epic poems about lost puppies and kittens nobody wanted, but she had been six years old then, seven at most, and wretchedly jejune. Jejune was a word she liked a lot because it meant "dull, insipid, juvenile, immature" — and yet it sounded as though it ought to mean something sophisticated and classy and smart. She liked things that weren't what they seemed to be, because too much in life was exactly what it seemed to be: dull, insipid, juvenile, and immature. Like her mother, for instance, like most TV shows and movies and half the actors in them — although not, of course, Haley Joel Osment, who was cute, sensitive, intelligent, charming, radiant, divine.

Micky and Mrs. D tried to delay Leilani's departure. They were afraid for her. They worried that her mother would hack her to pieces in the middle of the night or stuff cloves up her butt and stick an apple in her mouth and bake her for tomorrow's dinner- although they didn't express their concern in terms quite that graphic.

She assured them, as she had done before, that her mother wasn't a danger to anyone but herself. Sure, once they were on the road again, old Sinsemilla might set the motor home on fire while cooking up rock cocaine for an evening of good smoking. But she didn't have the capacity for violence. Violence required not merely a passing madness or an enduring insanity, but also passion. If looniness could be converted into bricks of gold, old Sinsemilla would provide paving for a six-lane highway from here to Oz, but she didn't have any real passion left; drugs of infinite variety had scorched away all her passion, leaving her with nothing but dreary need.

Mrs. D and Micky were also worried about Dr. Doom. Of course he was a more serious case than old Sinsemilla because he had reservoirs of passion, and every drop of it was used to water his fascination with death. He lived in a flourishing garden of death, in love with the beauty of his black roses, with the fragrance of decay.

He also had rules that he lived by, standards that he wouldn't compromise, and procedures that must be strictly followed in all life-and-death matters. Because he had committed himself to healing Leilani one way or another by her tenth birthday, she wouldn't be in danger until the eve of that anniversary; by then, however, if she hadn't ascended in the sparkling rapture of a starship's levitation beam, Preston would "cure" her more speedily and with a lot fewer dazzling special effects than extraterrestrials — a theatrical bunch— traditionally employed. Smothering her with a pillow or administering a lethal injection prior to the eve of her birthday would violate Preston's code of ethics, and he was as serious about his ethics as the most devout priest was serious about his faith.

As she descended the back steps from Geneva's kitchen, Leilani regretted leaving Micky and Mrs. D so anxious about her welfare. She enjoyed making people smile. She always hoped to leave them thinking, What a crackerjack that girl is, what a sassy piece of work. By sassy, of course, she wanted them to mean "pert, smart, jaunty" rather than "insolent, rude, impudent." Walking the line between the right kind of sassy and the wrong kind was tricky, but if you pulled it off, you would never leave them thinking, What a sad little crippled girl she is, with her little twisted leg and her little gnarled hand. This evening, she suspected that she'd crossed the line between the wrong and the right kinds of sassy, and in fact walked out of sassy altogether, leaving them feeling more pity than delight.

The failure to achieve sassy status still wasn't the reason she was ashamed of herself, but she was getting closer to the truth, so as she crossed the dark backyard, she distracted herself with a silly joke. Pretending that the thorny tentacles of the bloomless rosebush had threatened her, she turned to confront it, formed a cross with her arms—"Back, back!" — and warded it off as if it were a vampire.

Leilani glanced toward Geneva's place to determine whether this performance had been well received, but scoping the audience was a mistake. Micky stood at the bottom of the steps, and Mrs. D stood above her, in the open doorway, and even in this poor light, Leilani could see that they both still looked deeply concerned. Worse than concerned. Grim. Maybe even bleak.

Another spectacular, memorable social triumph by Ms. Heavenly Flower Klonk! Invite this charmer to dinner, and she'll repay you with emotional devastation! Serve her chicken sandwiches, and she'll give you a tale of woe that might wring pity even from the chicken she's eating, were the poor fowl still alive! Extend your invitations now! Her social calendar is nearly full! Remember: Only a statistically insignificant number of her dinner companions commit suicide!

Leilani didn't glance back again. She made a point of crossing the rest of the yard and negotiating the fallen fence with as little hitching of her braced leg as possible. When she concentrated on physical performance, she could move with a degree of gracefulness and even with surprising speed for short distances.

She continued to feel ashamed of herself, not because of the dumb joke with the rosebush, but because she had rudely presumed to monitor and restrict Micky's use of alcohol. Such meddling required remorse, even though she'd been motivated by genuine concern. Micky wasn't Sinsemilla, after all. Micky could have a brandy or two and not wind up, one year later, facedown in a puddle of vomit, her nasal cartilage rotted away by cocaine, with a lush crop of hallucinogenic mushrooms growing on the surface of her brain. Micky was better than that. Yeah, sure, all right, Micky did indeed harbor the tendency to self-destruct through addiction. Leilani could detect that dangerous inclination more reliably than the most talented fungi-hunting pig could locate buried truffles, which wasn't a flattering comparison, although true. But Micky's tendency wouldn't cause her to wander off forever into the spooky woods where Sinsemilla lived, because Micky also owned a moral compass, which Sinsemilla either never possessed or long ago lost. So any nine-year-old smartass who was judgmental enough to tell Michelina Bellsong that she'd had enough to drink ought to be ashamed.

As she crossed the next backyard, where earlier her mother danced with the moon, Leilani admitted that her shame hadn't arisen from her rudeness regarding Micky's drinking any more than it had been caused by eating two pieces of pie. The truth — which she had promised God always to honor, but which sometimes she sidled up to when she didn't have the nerve to approach it directly — the truth was that her shame arose from the fact that she had spilled her guts this evening. Spilled, gushed, spewed. She'd told them everything about Sinsemilla, about Preston and the aliens, about Lukipela murdered and probably buried in the woods of Montana.

Micky and Mrs. D were nice people, caring people, and when Leilani shared the details of her situation with them, she couldn't have done them a greater disservice if she had driven a dump truck through the front wall of their house and unloaded a few tons of fresh manure in their living room. Not only was it a hideous and distressing story, but they could do nothing to help her. Leilani knew better than anyone that she was caught in a trap nobody could pry open for her, that to have any hope of escape, she must chew off her foot and leave the trap behind — figuratively speaking, of course — before her birthday. Spilling her guts this evening had gained her nothing, but she'd left Micky and sweet Mrs. D under a big stinky pile of bad news from which they should have been spared.

Reaching the steps on which Sinsemilla perched after the moon dance, Leilani felt tempted to glance toward Geneva's. She resisted the urge. She knew they were still watching her, but a cheery wave wouldn't buck up their spirits and send them to bed with a smile.

Sinsemilla had left the kitchen door open. Leilani went inside.

During her short walk, the electrical service had come on again. The wall clock glowed, but it displayed the wrong time.

In spite of the slender red hand sweeping sixty moments per minute from the clock face, the flow of time seemed to have been dammed into a still pool. Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.

Dr. Doom had gone out to a movie or to dinner. Or to kill someone.

One day a would-be victim, impervious to Preston's dry charm and oily sympathy, would have a surprise ready for the doctor. Not much physical strength was required to pull a trigger.

Luck never favored Leilani, however, so she didn't assume that this would be the night when he received a heart-stopping dose of his own poison. He would return home sooner or later, smelling of one kind of death or another.

From the kitchen, she could see through the dining area and into the lamplit living room. Her mother wasn't in view, but that didn't mean she wasn't present. By this hour, old Sinsemilla would have been dragged so low by her demons and her drugs that she was less likely to be found in an armchair than hiding behind a sofa or curled in die fetal position on the floor of a closet.

As might be expected in an ancient and fully furnished mobile home available for by-the-week rental, the decor didn't rank with that in Windsor Castle. Acoustic ceiling tiles crawled with water stains from a long-ago leak, all vaguely resembling large insects. Sunlight had bleached the drapes into shades no doubt familiar to chronic depressives from their dreams; the rotting fabric sagged in greasy folds, reeking of years of cigarette smoke. Scraped, gouged, stained, patched furniture stood on an orange shag carpet that could no longer manage to be shaggy: The knotted nap was flat, all springiness crushed out of it, as if by the weight of all the hopes and dreams that people had allowed to die here over the years.

Sinsemilla wasn't in the living room.

The closet just inside the front door provided a perfect haven from the goblins that were sometimes unleashed by a double dose of blotter acid, peyote buttons, or angel dust. If Sinsemilla had taken refuge here, imaginary goblins bad eaten her as neatly as a duchess might eat pudding with a spoon. Currently the closet contained only a cluster of unused wire coat hangers that jangled in the influx of air when Leilani pulled open the door.

She hated searching for her mother like this. She never knew in what condition Sinsemilla would be found.

Sometimes dear Mater came complete with a mess to clean up. Leilani could handle messes. She didn't want to make a life's work out of swabbing up puke and urine, but she could do what needed to be done without adding two half-used pieces of apple pie to the mix.

The blood was worse. There were never oceans of it; but a little blood can appear to be a lot before you've assessed the situation.

Old Sinsemilla would never intentionally kill herself. She ate no red meat, restricted her smoking solely to dope, drank ten glasses of bottled water a day to cleanse herself of toxins, took twenty-seven tablets and capsules of vitamin supplements, and spent a lot of time worrying about global warming. She had been alive for thirty-six years, she said, and she intended to hang around for fifty more or until human pollution and the sheer weight of human population caused Earth's axis to shift violently and wipe out ninety-nine percent of all life on the planet, whichever came first.

Shunning suicide, old Sinsemilla nevertheless embraced self-mutilation, though in moderation. She worked on herself no more than once a month. She always sterilized the scalpel with a candle flame and her skin with alcohol, and she made each cut only after much judicious consideration.

Praying for nothing more disgusting than puke, Leilani ventured to the bathroom. This cramped, mildew-scented space was deserted and no worse of a mess than it had been when they moved in here.

A short hall, lined with imitation wood paneling, featured three doors. Two bedrooms and a closet.

In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn't actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn't here; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had decided that if any such door existed, it would have to find her. Besides, if this closet were the equivalent of a bus station between California and a glorious domain of fun-loving wizards, surely there would be crumpled wrappers from weird and unknown brands of candy discarded by traveling trolls or at least a pile of elf droppings, but the closet held nothing more exotic than one dead cockroach.

Two doors remained, both closed. On the right lay the small bedroom assigned to Leilani. Directly ahead was the room that her mother shared with Preston.

Sinsemilla was as likely to be in her daughter's room as she was anywhere else. She had no respect for other people's personal space and never demanded respect for her own, perhaps because with drugs she created a vast wilderness in her mind, where she enjoyed blissful solitude whenever she required it.

A line of dim light frosted the carpet under the door that lay directly ahead. No light, however, was visible under the door to the right.

This didn't mean anything, either. Sinsemilla liked to sit alone in the dark, sometimes trying to communicate with the spirit world, sometimes just talking to herself.

Leilani listened intently. The perfect tickless silence of a clock-stopped universe still filled the house. Bleeding, of course, is a quiet process.

In spite of a free-spirited tendency to be unrestrained in all things, Sinsemilla had thus far restricted her artistic scalpel work to her left arm. A six-inch-long, two-inch-wide snowflake pattern of carefully connected scars, as intricate as lacework, decorated or disfigured her forearm, depending on your taste in these matters. The smooth, almost shiny, scar tissue glowed whiter than the surrounding skin, an impressive tone-on-tone design, although the contrast became more pronounced when she tanned.

Leave the house. Sleep in the yard. Let Dr. Doom deal with the mess if there is one.

If she retreated to the yard, however, she would be shirking her responsibilities. Which was exactly what old Sinsemilla would do in a similar situation. In any predicament whatsoever, if Leilani wondered which among many courses of action was the right one and the wisest, she ultimately made her decision based on the same guiding principle: Do the opposite of what Sinsemilla would do, and there is a better chance that you'll come through all right, as well as an immeasurably higher likelihood that you'll be able to look in the mirror again without cringing.

Leilani opened the door to her room and switched on the light. Her bed was as neatly made as the ratty spread would allow, just as she'd left it. Her few personal items hadn't been disturbed. The Sinsemilla circus had not played an engagement here.

One door remained.

Her palms were damp. She blotted them on her T-shirt.

She remembered an old short story that she'd read, "The Lady or the Tiger," in which a man was forced to choose between two doors, with deadly consequences if he opened the wrong one. Behind this door waited neither a lady nor a tiger, but an altogether unique specimen. Leilani would have preferred the tiger.

Not out of morbid interest but with some degree of alarm, she'd researched self-mutilation soon after her mother became interested in it. According to psychologists, most self-mutilators were teenage girls and young women in their twenties. Sinsemilla was too old for this game. Self-mutilators frequently suffered from low self-esteem, even self-loathing. By contrast, Sinsemilla seemed to like herself enormously, most of the time, or at least when medicated, which was in fact most of the time. Of course, you had to suppose that she had originally gotten into heavy drugs not merely because "they taste so good," as she put it, but because of a self-destructive impulse.

Leilani's palms were still damp. She blotted them again. In spite of the August heat, her hands were cold. A bitter taste arose in her mouth, perhaps an onion blowback from Geneva's potato salad, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

At times like this, she tried to think of herself as Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley in Aliens. Your hands were damp, sure, and your hands were cold, all right, and your mouth was dry, but nevertheless you had to stiffen your spine, work up some spit, open the damn door, go in there where the beast was, and you had to do what needed to he done.

She blotted her hands on her shorts.

Most self-mutilators were deeply self-involved. A small number could be confidently diagnosed as narcissists, which was where old Sinsemilla and the psychologists definitely could shake hands. Mother in a merry mood often sang an ebullient mantra that she'd composed herself: "I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!" Depending on the mix of illegal substances that she consumed, when she was balancing just so on the tightrope between hyperactivity and drooling unconsciousness, she would sometimes repeat this mantra in a singsong voice, a hundred times, two hundred, until she either fell asleep or broke down sobbing and then fell asleep.

In three clinkless steel-assisted steps, Leilani reached the door. Ear to the jamb. Not a sound from the other side. Ripley usually had a big gun and a flamethrower. Here was where Mrs. D's occasional confusion of reality and cinema would come in handy. Recalling her previous triumph over the egg-laying alien queen, Geneva would smash through the door without hesitation, and kick butt.

One more blot. You didn't want slippery hands in a slippery situation.

Sinsemilla said she cried because she was a flower in a world of thorns, because no one here could see the full beautiful spectrum of her radiance. Sometimes Leilani thought this might indeed be the reason that her mother dissolved so often in tears, which was scary because it implied a degree of delusion that made this woman more alien than the ETs that Preston eagerly pursued. Narcissistic seemed inadequate to describe someone who, even when caked in her own vomit and reeking of urine and babbling incoherently, believed herself to be a more delicate and exquisite flower than any hothouse orchid.

Leilani knocked on the bedroom door. Unlike her mother, she had a respect for other people's personal spaces. Sinsemilla didn't respond to the knock. Maybe dear Mater was fine, in spite of her performance in the backyard. Maybe she was sleeping peacefully and ought to lie left to enjoy her dreams of better worlds.

Yeah, but maybe she was in trouble. Maybe this was one of those limes when knowing CPR proved useful or when you wanted paramedics. If you were on the road in unknown territory, you could pull down directions to the nearest hospital from a satellite; this high-tech age was the safest time in history for perpetually wrecked freaks with a yen to travel.

She knocked again.

She wasn't sure whether she should be relieved or anxious when her mother called out to her in a fruity theatrical voice: "Pray ye, say who knocketh upon my chamber door."

On a few occasions, when Sinsemilla had been in one of these playacting moods, Leilani had played along with her, speaking with the fake old-English dialect, using stage gestures and exaggerated expressions, hoping that a minim of mother-daughter bonding might occur. This always proved to be a bad idea. Old Sinsemilla didn't want you to become a member of the cast; you were expected only to admire and be charmed by her performance, for this was a one-woman show. If you persisted in sharing the spotlight, the larky dialogue took a nasty turn, whereupon you found yourself the target of mean criticism and vicious obscenities delivered in the stupid phony voice of whatever Shakespearean character or figure from Arthurian legend that Sinsemilla imagined herself to be.

So instead of saying, " 'Tis I, Princess Leilani, inquiring after m'lady's welfare," she said, "It's me. You okay?"

"Enter, enter, Maiden Leilani, and come thou quickly to thy queen's side."

Yuck. This was going to be worse than blood and mutilation.

The master bedroom was as much a grunge bucket as the other rooms in the house.

Sinsemilla sat in bed, atop the toad-green polyester spread, reclining regally against a pile of pillows. She wore the full-length embroidered slip with flounce-trimmed skirt that she had bought last month at a flea market near Albuquerque, New Mexico, on their way to explore the alien enigmas of Roswell.

If whorehouse decor favored red light, as reputed, then this atmosphere was holier suited to a prostitute than to a queen. Though both nightstand lamps were aglow, a scarlet silk blouse draped one lampshade, and a scarlet cotton blouse covered the other. This quality of light flattered Sinsemilla. Bindles, kilos, bales, ounces, pints, and gallons of illegal substances had stolen less of her beauty than seemed either probable or fair, and as good as she looked in daylight, she was even prettier here. Although her bare feet were grass-stained and filthy, though her fine slip was rumpled and streaked with dirt, though her hair had been tossed and tangled by the moon dance, she might pass for a queen.

"What saith thee, young maiden, in the presence of Cleopatra?" Stopping two steps inside the door, Leilani didn't suggest that an Egyptian queen who had reigned more than two thousand years ago probably had not spoken in a phony accent out of a bad production of Camelot. "I was going to bed, and I just thought I'd see if you were all right."

Waving Leilani toward her, Sinsemilla said, "Come hither, dour peasant girl, and let thy queen acquaint thee with a work of art fair suitable for the galleries of Eden."

Leilani had no clue to the meaning of her mother's words. From experience she knew that purposefully remaining clueless might be the wisest policy.

She advanced one more step, not out of a sense of obligation or curiosity, but because by turning away too quickly, she might invite accusations of rudeness. Her mother imposed no rules or standards on her children, gave them the freedom of her indifference; yet she was sensitive to any indication that her indifference might be repaid in kind, and she wouldn't tolerate a thankless child.

Regardless of the inconsequential nature or the questionable validity of the triggering offense, an upbraiding from old Sinsemilla could escalate into a long bout of vicious hectoring. Although Mother might not be capable of physical violence, she could do serious damage with words. Because she'd follow you anywhere, push through any door, and insist on your attention, you could find no sanctuary and had to endure her verbal battering — sometimes for hours — until she wound down or went away to get high. During the worst of these harangues, Leilani often wished that her mother would dispense with all the hateful words and throw a few punches instead.

Leaning forward from the pillows, old Sinsemilla Cleopatra spoke with a smiling insistence that Leilani knew to be a cold command: "Come, glowering girl, come, come! Looketh upon this little beauty and wish that thou were as well made as she."

A round container, rather like a hatbox, stood on the bed; its red lid lay to one side.

Sinsemilla had been shopping earlier, in the afternoon. With her, Preston was generous, providing money for drugs and baubles. Maybe she had in fact bought a hat, for in her more seductive moods, she liked the glamour of berets and billycocks, panamas and turbans, cloches and calashes.

"Don't tarry, child!" the queen commanded. "Come hither at once and lay thine eyes upon this treasure out of Eden."

Obviously, this audience with her highness wouldn't end until the new hat — or whatever — had been properly admired.

With a mental sigh that she dared not voice, Leilani approached the bed.

As she drew closer, she noticed that the hatbox was perforated by two parallel, encircling lines of small holes. For a moment this seemed like mere decoration, and Leilani didn't deduce the function of the holes until she saw what had come in the container.

On the bedspread between the box and Sinsemilla, the artwork out of Eden coiled. Emerald-green, burnt umber, with a filigree of chrome-yellow. Sinuous body, flat head, glittering black eyes, and a flickering tongue designed for deception.

The snake turned its head to inspect its new admirer, and with no warning, it struck at Leilani as quick as an electrical current would leap across an arc between two charged poles.